An experimental blog delivered in text/plain only.
Questionnaire - Plain Text ========================== The Frugal Gamer recently shared[1] her answers to the questions posed by plain-text advocate Ellane in her post "Answer These Eight Questions About Your Plain Text Files"[2], and this blog (being even more "plain text" than either of those!) seems like an obvious place to answer those questions on my own behalf, too. Let's give them a go! 1.…
Other text-only websites ------------------------ Terence Eden's come up with a list of other text-only websites: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites/ As you might expect, none of those listed are ENTIRELY plain text like this one (ignoring its feed, which is XML), but it's still pretty cool to see. Of course, a lot of Gemlogs etc. ought to qualify! The…
No JS (Club) ------------ There's an online club - inspired by the likes of 1mb.club, 512k.club, and 250k.club - called the No JS Club <https://no-js.club/>. The idea is that for your site to be eligible for membership it must use no JavaScript whatsoever. Should textplain.blog count? It certainly has no JavaScript! But when I went through the steps to prove this blog's eligibility, I fell at the…
The Scroll Art Museum --------------------- The Scroll Art Museum <https://scrollart.org/> demonstrates how "ASCII art" can be so much more than a static medium by showcasing artwork exploiting scrolling of text as a way of implementing basic animation. That doesn't sound as good as it looks when you see it for yourself: its worth a peep. A wrote a little more about the museum, and my favourite…
Downtime -------- As Dan observed (https://danq.me/2025/08/29/27143/) the textplain.blog vanished from the Internet for a few hours today. Turns out that even a semi-static blog like this one can go down if, y'know, the VPS it's hosted on goes belly-up: > Last night, an undermaintained VPS of mine went kaput. > > The data’s all fine, and most of the services I was running on it came back > up in…
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | This is a repost of an article originally written at: | | https://danq.me/2025/03/19/webdx-does-more-mean-better/ | | | | It's republished here to help reinforce its point! It's perfectly readable | | here, right? And yes there's no JS, no CSS... not even any HTML. Sometimes | | plain text is all you need. |…
You might argue that a plain text blog is pretty low on features. But that, in itself, might actually be considered a feature! There's a beautiful simplicity and minimalism to a plain text blog. I've written about the benefits - to e.g. performance, security, and accessibility - that a plain text blog provides, at https://textplain.blog/benefits Sure, there are limitations too, but there may be…
Making a website that's plain text is tadiweb-compliant. F'real. Look: https://www.tadiweb.com/text.txt
.well-known/feeds[1] is a standard I proposed[2] last year to try to make it easier for websites to expose a list (via OPML) of their most-relevant site-wide RSS/etc. feeds. For a blog, that might be a feed of all of their posts, for example. Or several feeds, one of each of a variety of post types or content categories. The thinking is that this provides a way for sites to list feeds in a central…
One of many great things about a completely plain-text blog is the security guarantees it provides of your visitors. When all of your content is delivered with MIME type text/plain, you can be sure there's no Javascript, no third-party cookies, no fingerprinting, etc. You're even safe from buffer overruns in image libraries. Remember CVE-2023-4863? Last year, a bug turned up that meant that…
> TEXT WAS NOT MEANT TO BE GIVEN STYLES > > YEARS OF WEB DESIGN yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for anything more than PLAIN TEXT > > Want the line length to be shorter? We have a tool for that: It’s called “RESIZE YOUR BROWSER” > > “I need a twelve column grid layout. It should be four columns on small screens.” > — Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged - https://cssisntreal.com/ 🤣
Terence Eden has implemented a WordPress theme which makes it much-easier to run a plain text blog! This CMS remains a much more-lightweight way to make a text/plain-only blog, of course, but I can't deny that doing this in WordPress is pretty damn cool. He's also managed to make it so that you can convert almost any page on his blog by simply adding a .txt suffix to the URL. I assume it's powered…
The entire source code for this project is available, by the way. You can find it at: https://github.com/Dan-Q/textplain.blog
Without a <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://textplain.blog/feed">, RSS readers might fail to autodiscover the RSS feed URL of a blog. That's challenging when your content is all delivered in text/plain, because you can't HAVE a tag like that! There's an alternative solution which I've implemented here - a Link: HTTP header. If you check the HTTP headers sent by this…
Who says a blog post has to have a title? In his blog post on 2 May 2024[1], Terence Eden observes that the HTML specification requires that a web page has to have a <title> (even if that title is empty, which it really shouldn't be!). But arguing that this implies that a blog post must have a title presupposes that a blog post can only be written in HTML... Who says that a blog post... or a blog…